We've been asking vendors and consultants about call monitoring and recording for the last few weeks for our September feature on the subject and we've been getting some good responses. Our first question is the most basic: what is the goal of the quality monitoring system today? It isn't as straight forward as it used to be, with enterprises using the call center's recordings for business intelligence and marketing, not just agent training.

ICMI consultant Lesley Vereen reminded us that any system is only as good as its users -- software that isn't implemented properly is useless, and it needs the enterprise's support:

"Although the technology itself doesn't result in improvement of quality anymore than a workforce management system results in improvement of the forecasting and scheduling process, a Quality Monitoring System can play a critical role in the success of an organization's quality monitoring program. In order to know what to expect from the QMS, we need to identify the quality goals, where all of the quality data and interfaces are and what we're going to do with data once we have it."

So what do vendors have to say? We asked a few of them via e-mail, and here's what they had to say.

Companies and their call centers are used to thinking about customers from an asymmetrical point of view. What I mean is that they tend to view customers as "powerful" only when they are aggregated into huge groups. Any individual unhappy customer is a case to be resolved, but an army of unhappy customers is a force to be reckoned with.

The Consumerist says yes, citing federal statute 18 U.S.C. Sec. 2511(2)(d). I'm not going to try to parse the legalese -- suffice it to say that the blog thinks it's made a case.

Further, Consumerist says the only time a caller has to say he or she is recording is when calling a call center in your home state if you live in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, or Washington. Any other time, including making state-to-state calls, "You can secretly record to your heart's delight."

The issue came up when a Consumerist reader complained that T-Mobile refused to talk to him (company policy, they said) when he announced that he, too, was recording the call for quality assurance purposes. Consumerist's riposte? "Next time, just don't tell them."

"They're felons, and they've got your number," read a South African headline. "Convicted Murderers Offer Directory Assistance," said another. "Dial M for Mobsters: Italy sets up call centre in jail," shouted the Scotsman's headline. "The next time you call directory enquiries in Italy, you may speak to a convicted murderer," warned Australia's Perth Now. Indian news sources, gleeful for something that made their outsourcers look benign, were just as smug: "Hello, murderer speaking!" said the Hindustan Times.

Much, if not all of the international coverage of Rome's Rebibbia prison call center has been hysterical. Read below the headlines and you'll learn that only 24 (or 26, depending on the source) inmates actually work there, that prisoners cannot dial out, and that the handful of convicts, specifically chosen for the job, are grateful for the work experience.

Is there anything wrong with prison call centers? Read our news story Roman Prison Call Center Raises Ruckus and then tell us what you think. We'd love to hear from our readers about this sensitive issue.

The Sydney Morning Herald's Graeme Philpson recently went "behind enemy lines" -- to a call center in India -- and sat with agent Deepak, aka Derek:

"I asked him if he ever got discouraged. He didn't lie. He said 'Yes.' But he ploughed on, through his eight-hour shift, working on the basis that about three calls out of every hundred would end in a completed survey.

"It is likely that Derek, or one of his thousands of colleagues, has called you recently. Most of us find these calls rather tiresome. Ways to get rid of such callers have become the stuff of dinner party conversations.

"Should you just hang up? Or ask them to wait a minute and leave them on hold till they hang up? Or say something clever such as 'sorry, I'm busy at the moment but leave me your home number and I'll call you there at an inconvenient time.' After watching Derek and hundreds of others at work, I can assure you that the best thing to do is to politely and clearly say "I'm not interested thanks" and hang up immediately. It gets them out of your hair and allows them to move on."

Read the rest of Philpson's report here.

Here's something I found out the other day: more people are employed in call centers in the US than in the entire agricultural industry.

Stop and think about that. Just a century ago we were still largely a nation of farmers. Now we're a nation of service people.

I was thinking about this because agribusiness is a huge colossus that bestrides the nation and its policy-making apparatus. Think about Iowans and the ethanol fetish they bring out in politicians every four years; think about agricultural price supports and how much of the federal budget they consume. Think about simple things like the food pyramid and the conniptions the FDA goes through every time they want to revise it because of the power of the farming lobby. Agriculture is everywhere, it's practically in the DNA of America. Except that no one works on farms anymore.

I've always assumed that about 4% of the American workforce is employed in call centers, and I ballparked that 2% worked on farms. I never put them together before (or thought to check the accuracy). So I went to the website of the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics and there, lo and behold, I was right. They count almost 3 million call center reps and less than half a million agriworkers.

There are more call center reps than there are accountants in America.

There are more call center reps than there are lawyers.

Agribusiness is so powerful because it's not fragmented; it's run by a small number of very large companies that carefully groom their image through collective action in the form of lobbying and public relations. The call center industry, by contrast, does nothing of the kind. It is an army of trained professionals that functions largely without leadership or collective guidance. Imagine what it would be like if we had a lobbying group to call our own, even a trade association. We might even be able to get the government to build tariffs to keep foreign call centers from handling our calls offshore. Oh wait, we don't want that. Sorry - just channelling Lou Dobbs there for a minute.

The Washington Post interviewed Ben Popken, editor of one of our favorite blogs -- The Consumerist. Popken gives tips on how to avoid -- or at least mitigate -- customer service nightmares. Tip one: keep a written log of your call center interactions.

Beware dear agents, super-informed, super-organized callers armed with recording devices are going to get more common.

Read the rest of Popkens's tips here.

A site run by the same publisher (the Gawker group), Lifehacker, has some tips from readers on getting good service here. One reader had this to say:

I suggest that where legal (apparently in 38 states - check your local laws) we ALL start taping our calls to customer service. If they think their call may end up on a blog post somewhere, perhaps they will treat the customer with a little respect. I also must point out that not all CS calls are a nightmare... in fact I had a rather pleasant call this morning with a woman from Virginia who worked for Verizon. I'm all for praising a company or person, when they get it right.

Get it while you still can -- Consumerist has AOL's complete customer retention manual available for download. Just click on the smoking gun image (I'm not kidding) to download a pdf.

Even if you're squeamish about downloading a company's employee training documents, read the Consumerist critique and coverage of the AOL client retention debacle.

It's bizarre. You can use it to explain to your call center exactly what you should not do, which is to "Think of Cancellation Calls as Sales Leads," as the AOL manual says. It's slimy and your customers aren't that stupid.

Here's a short summary of AOL's customer service slide into media hell:

1. August 2005: New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer gets AOL to pay a $1.25 million fine for its nasty policy of haggling with customers who try to cancel service, and for billing cancelers anyway.

2. June 2006: AOL customer Vincent Ferrari records the call he makes to AOL. Ferrari tries to cancel and the agent, known only as 'John,' argues with him for about four minutes that seem like hours. Ferrari posts the recording all over the Internet.

3. Vincent Ferrari becomes the new Paul English, appearing on talk shows and in newspapers all over the country.

4. AOL representative Nicholas Graham apologizes publicly to Ferrari, announcing that 'John' has been fired, saying that he "violated our customer service guidelines and practices, and everything that AOL believes to be important in customer care - chief among them being respect for the member, and swiftly honoring their requests." No one buys it. The blogosphere flames are fanned.

5. July 2006: the Consumerist blog obtains an AOL client retention manual from a disgruntled employee. They publish it online.

Frequent readers of this blog know that I have a few favorite technology and call center blogs. I check them often, looking for news, opinions, anecdotes, and controversy, and I often post my findings here.

I'm always looking for more. I'd like to know what technology and call center blogs you read -- e-mail your picks to me at hsheff@cmp.com.

In the meantime, here's a list of a few of my favorites:

In a previous post, Customer Service Ninjas Slice Through Average CSRs -- Learn How, I quoted some advice from ICMI's Queue Tips page on dealing with callers who ask to speak to a manager. The original question, asked by Lynn Cherry of Skylight Financial was this:

How do you respond to a customer who insists on speaking to a supervisor or "someone in authority" for routine issues that an agent is capable of handling? Is it rude to refuse the transfer?

There were some pretty cynical answers from some very practical managers ("when customers insist on talking to a supervisor we just passed it to the next guy, introducing him as supervisor."). One respondent emphasized that "if the customer keeps on insisting he/she should be transferred immediately." That's true, and it's better than some of the other answers, but it still didn't quite satisfy me. The latest response, however, did satisfy me. Here it is in full:

Lots of American news in this installment of the call center report: openings in Oregon, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Missouri

One of the highlights of my recent trip to Cairo was participating in a panel discussion about the different attitudes toward offshoring in the US and the UK. I represented the US point of view along with Keith Fiveson of ITESA. (Ironic, isn't it, that the American contingent consists of two guys named Keith from New York City?)

It ain't quite over yet. After Vincent Ferrari's much-publicized call to AOL, a frustratingly long but ultimately successful attempt to cancel his online service, the beleaguered online service is trying to pick up the pieces.

"By my count, he used the word 'cancel' 21 times. That's not counting the I-don't-need-it's, I-don't-want-it's and I-don't-use-it's. Add the other inferences, it's probably closer to 30," said AOL spokesman Nicholas J. Graham, quoted in the New York Times last week. He was talking about how many times Ferrari tried to make it clear that he wanted his service canceled.

Last April, Peter Leppik of Vocal Laboratories, a Minnesota-based customer service survey firm, posted his list of the Top Ten Most Annoying Recorded Messages on the VocaLabs blog. Now, three months later, Leppik's wife tells him she's been asked by her employer to lend her voice to a short message that happens to be number ten on the list.

From the Consumerist blog entry titled "How to be a Customer Service Ninja": a reader writes in to share a "hot tip" on how to "pole vault low-level CSR [sic] and reach the Valhalla of customer service" which you may know as "the phone call equivalent to the holy grail -- a call back by someone on the executive service team." Not to mix metaphors.